


Waiting Out the Night

by TheElusiveBadger



Series: into the desert [3]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anakin Skywalker Gets a Hug, Canonical Character Death, Giant Spiders, Miscommunication, POV Padmé Amidala, Tatooine Slave Culture (Star Wars)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-08
Updated: 2021-02-08
Packaged: 2021-03-14 04:41:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29290002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheElusiveBadger/pseuds/TheElusiveBadger
Summary: Padmé waits out the night at the Lars homestead while Anakin Skywalker goes to find his mother.
Relationships: Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker
Series: into the desert [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2135958
Comments: 4
Kudos: 156





	Waiting Out the Night

Padmé leans against the warm pourstone of the arched, open doorway that leads down into the Lars domicile, as she watches the speeder disappear into the distant haze of the suns beating down over the flat surface of the Great Chott salt flat. The insulation of the stone keeps the worst of the heat from settling like a shroud around her, blocks the dust and the grit of the sand from clinging to her clothes, and gives the tiniest spark of life in a vast desert of endless waste as far as eyes can see. The humming sound of the multiple vaporators working away to dreg up the scarce moisture from the air sputters and spurts, while every once in a while it breaks up into jarring, loud bangs which puncture the sound of the Lars’ conversation in the farm below with the reminder that there is work to be done if they are to survive. 

Padmé’s seen planets like this before, walked through camps filled with tents and refugees and tables laden with meagre resources while one or two volunteers provided subsistence to hungry lifeforms. Once, she’d slept on a hard cot normally used by two in a small, cramped hovel, mind restless and half aware of the little boy curled up on a kitchen chair, his mother stretched out on the floor behind her, and Qui Gon’s steady, meditated breathing. Her mind had been filled with duty, with the blockade above Naboo, and the fate of her own people, but present enough to notice the hunger pane frame of Shmi Skywalker, the sunken cheeks and bend of fragile, brittle bones in the Mos Espa slave quarters, and the shadow of danger in the desert that could turn as quick as a storm in the sea. 

The suns begin to dip low in the sky, creating a canvas of hazy colors, vibrant pinks and reds and yellows swirling over the bland, beige landscape as the moons become visible over the horizon. She drags her teeth over her bottom lip, worrying it, as she wonders where Anakin is, how far out he’s gone, and when he will be back. As her thoughts turn to following him in her own ship, she hears Owen Lars say, “If he dies out there, how are we supposed to pay for lost property?” 

Anakin will not die out there, she thinks. This place will not take him, not from he—no. From the Jedi. This place with its cruelty, with its oppressive heat and harsh lifeforms, is not the end of Anakin Skywalker. She doesn’t know how to tell the Lars this, not when they wear their grief etched as painted lines on the crags and wrinkles of their faces, and spoke so openly about their doomed longing for Shmi’s return. Padmé is a stranger to them, and they to her, and she did not fail to miss the way Beru had eyed her suspiciously at their arrival, her clothes and bearing standing out next to the rough homespun and tired countenances of the farmers. 

Jaws clenching, she tears herself away from the sight of the salt flat, and makes her way down the stairs to the open courtyard, a hard packed crater carved from the landscape, and makes for the door to the dining area, the sand coating her boots with a thick film. Cliegg Lars, drawn and weary and far older than his years allow, nods to her as she enters, but does not move his hoverchair closer nor engage in conversation. Instead, he hangs his head low, gaze fixed on the table, with the weight of a month or a year’s or decades worth of worries cradling him. Owen Lars, who’s standing on the opposite side of the table, a hand raised in the air towards the desert, towards the direction Anakin left, stiffens, spine growing straight, as his hard-eyed gaze locks on her. She watches as his throat moves, trapping the words meant for his father, before he steps back, farther from her, and says, “How may we help you, milady?” 

She thinks about correcting him. Padmé, she almost replies, you may call me Padmé, but decorum and long years of political experience stop her at the brink of informality. They are strangers, she reminds herself, and this is the more proper form of address. She thinks of the sound of her name from Sabé, from Rabé and Dormé, and Eirtaé, the way Anakin’s outer rim accent drags along the syllables, and wonders at the intimacy of this situation which locks four strangers into a waiting period with no clear end. Awkwardly, she opens her mouth to answer, not sure, exactly, what she is intending to say, but a voice behind her speaks first. “Oh, sorry, excuse me.” 

Padmé startles, then steps back, almost knocking into Beru, in her haste to leave enough space in the open archway for the other woman to cross through with a platter laden with bowls, cups, and spoons. “Oh, no, my apologies. Do you need any help?” 

Cliegg looks up from his staring match with the table, and Owen’s left eyebrow rises almost to his hairline, while Beru blinks, slow and confused. “No,” she replies, in a small, but polite voice. “It is easy to manage. Thank you, milady.” 

Padmé nods, the loosening curls of her functional braid brushing against the bare skin of her back. The fabric of her outfit is cool, cool enough to shield the blazing heat of the desert environment, and even though the exposed flesh of her back threatens to blister and redden if she remains under the twin suns’ harsh glare, she waits until Beru heads back to the kitchen to fetch dinner for the night. 

Owen places four bowls around the table, then glances to Padmé, who stands with her arms crossed around her middle. “Please, sit. You must be hungry. It’s a long way from Mos Espa.” There’s a fifth plate on the platter, she notices, as she sits in the same spot that she’d sat in earlier that day, where Cliegg Lars told them about Shmi Skywalker’s abduction. Anakin’s presence, tense and scared and familiar beside her, and she’d longed to reach out to him, to offer him something, anything but silence and distance. She wonders, as she watches Owen’s hand hover over the fifth bowl, a frown on his face, before he lifts it up and places it on the table next to her, if Shmi had often sat in this spot. Sat in this spot and longed for the son she’d lost. Had she thought she would never see him again? Did she think he had abandoned her? 

The utensils are quickly placed around the bowls, then the jars. It was simple, nothing near the elaborate displays of Coruscanti feasts, Alderannian parties, or the artistic Naboo dinner theatre that Padmé often participated in during her tenure as Queen. Owen worked quickly and efficiently, keeping a deferential distance between them even in the small, curved room cropped into the landscape. Anxious for something to take her mind off Anakin, she looks to the ceiling, smiling at the black designs painted there. 

When she tears her gaze away, she sees that Cliegg’s knuckles are pale white and crooked around the jar he’s holding in his hand. “Ani will do all he can to bring your wife home,” Padmé tells him. The nickname slips out naturally here; Ani is who she’d known in this land, small and friendly, sad but kind. She still sees traces of that boy in the man she’d frolicked with by the lake on Naboo. 

“Hmmm,” Cliegg replies, as his gaze moves past her to settle on the wall, as if he could see to where his wife and stepson were. “I’ve no doubt he’ll do what he can. But the desert takes, and the Sand People are not known for keeping prisoners long. I’m afraid you’ve brought him back here too late.” 

He says it as if she’s done them a great kindness, and perhaps she has, though she knows that she would have done something sooner. Sabe had spent months on Tatooine, months working with movements to free slaves, but Shmi’s name had not come up. Padmé should have pushed more for locating Shmi, she realizes as guilt churned heavy and acidic in her stomach, rising with a sour taste up the back of her throat as Beru returns with a large bowl of steaming food and a jug of refreshments. She should have done more.

Beru pours them all a glass of blue milk, which Padmé recognizes from her last time on this planet. She remembers it as a sour, thick liquid with a lingering aftertaste, but water was scarce and precious here, even on a moisture farm. She’s seen little evidence of large stocks or barrels filled with the galaxy’s most important resource. She’s been lucky, she realizes, not for the first time, to grow up on Naboo, where water is not a commodity and lifeforms took for granted its daily abundance. 

“Thank you,” Padmé tells them, as Beru explains the dish is ahrisa, with haroun bread on the side. She remembers this, too, as the food Shmi had given to her, Jar Jar Binks, and Qui Gon Jinn. They’d been made of some sort of protein, not meat, with a spicy kick to them from the black bits that exploded hot and peppery on the back of her tongue. 

“You’re welcome,” Beru says, and sits down across from Padmé, next to Owen, who stares at the empty seat next to Padmé. Cliegg picks up his fork, silently beginning to eat. 

They sit in silence for a few minutes, the air tense, as Padmé picks delicately at the food, while the Lars eat with the sort of determined emphasis that refugees and poorer folk often do, as if they’re not sure when they’ll get their next meal. Anakin, too, eats like this; he eats like food is a gift, never leaving anything behind, not the way Padmé, in her bad habits, tends to do. She thinks of the stale containers rotting in the back of the conservator back in her apartment at 500 Republica, from too many late nights and too much made by personal cooks. 

With nothing else to say, Padmé compliments Beru’s cooking, even as she reaches for the glass of blue milk to soothe her irritated throat. “Thank you,” Beru says, while Padmé glances to the empty seat next to her. “It’s a shame that Anakin left with no provisions.” 

Owen’s spoon clatters against the bowl, before he says, in a tone Padmé hesitates to call fond, “He’s late to dinner again.” Cliegg’s craggy face breaks into a smile, small but noticeable, while Beru lets out a light laugh. Padmé scrunches her eyebrows, which lower almost to the bridge of her nose, confused by the use of _again_ , but before she can ask, Beru says, “I’ll leave Anakin something out, if that is alright with you, milady?” 

“Oh,” Padmé says, perplexed by the odd deference and request for permission towards her, a stranger in the Lars’ homestead. “I’m sure Ani will be famished. We didn’t eat much on our way here.” She blinks, then bites her lip. “I don’t think he brought anything with him, either, leaving as fast as he did.” 

She thinks back to the last two days. Their trip here had been defined by a whirlwind of worried, harried turbulence. Anakin had flown the ship with a single-minded determination, quiet and introspective, almost closed off to her, and Padmé had longed to talk to him, to bridge the gap between him and comfort him. She doesn’t recall either of them eating more than a couple of chalky, tasteless protein bars. His knuckles had grown steadily whiter with the force of his grip on the controls the closer they got to Tatooine, and he’d hesitated, standing on the edge of the ramp with a lost, uncertain expression, before exiting the ship. His face quickly turned stoney the second his boots touched the ground, and he’d glared at the sand and the docking bay and the stooped backed old woman who demanded a parking fee. “Republic credits not good here,” she’d insisted once, then twice, then several more times to a steadily more frustrated Padmé, before Anakin had stepped in and spoke to her in a dialect that Padmé couldn’t understand. The woman had backed off after that, grumbling in Huttese under her rancid breath, while Padmé went to find transport to Watto’s shop to save them from a trek in the scorching heat with their ill fitting clothes. She’d forgotten the arid feeling of the air on Tatooine, how each breath felt like sandpaper in the back of the throat, and how fabric sticks with sweat to every inch of skin, making her shift uncomfortably during their ride. With each alley they’d sped through, each lifeform they encountered, stares had followed them, a hundred eyes on Padmé’s back at once, making her stiff and tense, muscles coiled and ready to spring up at a moment’s notice, acutely aware of her outsider status to this planet. Throughout it all, Anakin remained disconcertingly quiet.

Owen scoffs around his spoon, bringing her back to the present, and mumbles in a voice so low Padmé only picks up a few words, “—takes poor care—” before Beru gently shushes him. They eat the rest of the meal in relative silence, but Padmé notes that Cliegg’s head turns, every so often, to stare towards the farm’s alchoved stairway, perhaps hoping to spot Anakin making his way down. 

Perhaps, even, with Shmi. 

Later, while the light from the three moons shines bright through the open window of the bedroom Beru had escorted Padmé to, she tosses and turns on the sleeping pad with mounting worry. She sighs, then scoots up the sleeping pad, knees bent, to rest her head against the wall behind her, her arms cradling her stomach. Eyes closed, she breathes in deeply, the air still arid, though cooler than day, with even the silk of her sleeping gown suffocating against her sweaty skin. The minutes and hours are crawling on. The words she’d spoken after dinner haunted her—the ease in which she’d spoken her feelings aloud to C-3PO, her concern for Anakin, pushed down beneath rationalizations and duty when being here, on Tatooine, witnessing the life that Shmi managed to build for herself even amongst all the tragedies given to her—had broken through the dam in her feelings that she’d been suppressing at Varykino. Each smile, every laugh, their long talks and debates and picnics in the meadow, small and fleeting though it was in the grand scheme of her life, felt like bubbles of joy, something secret and just for her. Private, when so much of her life was a public face, for a public good; instead, those moments were just hers. Just theirs. 

She lifts herself away from the sleeping pad, slips on the thin robe that matches her sleeping gown, and gathers her hair into a half-hazard mess of curls piled on top of her head. As she retreats from the bedroom and up the stairs, she realizes with the growing dread that her worry is _fear_ for Anakin. Like Cliegg Lars, she’d begun to doubt his return when left alone with her own racing thoughts, and more, her belief that if—when—he did return, it would be changed, altered unutterably by whatever sights he’d see. 

Once she’s out into the courtyard and outside the homestead, she stops, arms crossed around her chest, and she breathes in the desert air as the hot wind blows the bottom of her ground against the stand, pushing up grains over the open slates in her sandals. The night sky is a brilliant canvas of colours; deep purples and navy blues with undertones of red and pinks, faint, with tiny spots of brightly twinkling stars visible without the pollution of more heavily urbanized planets. It brings life to the endless expanse of beige sand that stretches far beyond what she can see; somewhere out there is Anakin, and Shmi, perhaps staring at the same sky. She hopes they are on their way back underneath this sky, with its picturesque natural beauty of a multitude of different pigmentations that no Nubian artist could ever dream to replicate.

“You shouldn’t be out here alone,” a gruff, tired voice says behind her. She startles, the back of her sandals scraping through the sand, as she cranes her neck to the right to spot Owen Lars coming up the stairs. He’s dressed in a light, but rough looking shirt and billowy sleep pants, and his hair is frizzy, as if he’s spent most of his time since dinner running his hands through it. Behind him is Beru, dressed similarly to her boyfriend, her hair covered by a white scarf knotted at the top of her forehead. “It’s not safe for anyone. Not anymore.” 

Despite the heat, every inch of them below the neck seems to be covered, hands free, but feet covered by cloth shoes that cinched tightly just above their ankles. Draped over one arm, Beru has a brown blanket, while the other balances a basket filled with four thermajugs and a folded white robe underneath them. Owen holds a fusion lantern in his curled fingers, which illuminates the sand before him and casts a dark shadow to their silhouettes. 

“We’ll join you if you’re going to sit out here and wait, milady,” Beru says. “We don’t want any harm to come to you.” Owen says nothing, just puts the fusion lantern down near the alcove, where conical, fluted flowers grow on long stems, pointed towards the ground. Padmé nods her consent with a soft thank you, while Beru shakes out the blanket, the fabric fluttering it in the wind like a gentle wave. 

As Padmé goes to sit on the blanket, Beru hands her the robe. “To protect from the elements. Your attire is…” The older woman trails off, and she looks away, to turn to Owen. 

Grateful for their wisdom, Padmé slips on the robe. It’s rough against her skin, but surprisingly open. It trails down almost to her ankles, and she realizes she must look a sight in her beaded deep purple shimmer silk nightgown and this simple, homespun white robe. Owen and Beru sit, too, crossing their legs so that their feet are underneath their thighs, and then Owen hands out two thermajugs, then lifts his own from the basket. 

Owen clears his throat, as his right hand lifts to rub the back of his newk. Then, he tells Padmé, “Dad will probably be up soon. He’s been coming out here almost every night since Mom die—disappeared.” 

Padmé nods back. Her thick hair feels like a heavy weight on the top of her head, and some curls swing loose to tumble over her eyes and the bridge of her nose. She flicks them away, and finds herself gazing back at the vast expanse of desert. She doesn’t even know which way to focus, doesn’t know which way he will be heading back. “I’m just a bit restless,” she tells Owen and Beru. Her fingers idly play along the metal of the thermajug, rubbing up and down in a circular motion. 

“That’s natural,” Beru replies, then lifts the jug up to take a sip of the liquid inside. Half-heartedly, Padmé does the same, and a burst of tepid, sour, and fermented thick goop, a bit like yogurt with a more pungent aftertaste, and a peppery flourish, slides down her throat. 

“This is good,” she informs Beru with all the practiced politeness she employs during diplomatic dinners with various planets' most important cultural dishes being served. She takes another sip, then a few more as they sit in awkward silence for some time, surprised to find that the taste grows on her the more she consumes it. 

She startles, her right sandal kicking out into the sand, dispersing a large amount of it outwards, as a clash and a clang echo behind her. Something large, and _hairy_ , and monstrous shoots out from the new hole with remarkable speed, but Owen quickly reacts. Padmé scuffles back, almost knocking into Beru, who grabs her shoulder firmly, keeping her in place, and they both watch in stuttered silence as Owen swings the hammer at the _spider_ , hitting it accurately at the top of its head. Owen rises and brings the hammer down again with a sickening crunch. The legs shrivel up and curl inward as the dying insect lets out an ear-piercing screech, before he flicks it away with the blunt metal prongs of the hammer. 

“Well, you couldn’t have knocked up something we can eat, milady?” Cliegg Lars announces, his hover chair coming to rest near the foul corpse. Owen wipes the hammer off with a cloth napkin, both of which must have been hidden underneath the robe before, then rolls his eyes, muttering so low Padmé can’t make out the words. “Go get the lighter.” 

“Sorry,” Padmé said, her breath still caught in her throat. Naboo, too, had some jump scare creatures prone to leaping at unsuspecting Nubians, or Gungans, and she’d even heard some offworlders refer to the creatures there, such as the slitherfish, as refuse from Hell itself, but this corpse appears menacing even stiff, hunched, and growing cold. “That was unexpected. What _is_ it?” 

Cliegg grunts, shrugs, and looks towards the horizon. “Spider. Toxic, and useless,” he says, and that ends the exchange. It still looks remarkably empty, but Padmé is struck by the sudden thought of exactly what type of creatures lurk underneath the dunes. Naboo’s lakes could be treacherous, but the children there, newly learning to swim in the shallows, are taught which depths not to venture too, which weeds will grab hold of ankles and calves to drag down unsuspecting victims, and which times of the year the more dangerous predators are wont to attack. Similarly, Tatooine residents must know this about the threats underneath the sand, lurking in the caverns, and the dire warnings in the air of imminent storms. She thinks of Anakin as she first met him, thin and wide-eyed and small, but already so kind. Already so deferential and willing to shelter strangers. 

_It is different_ , she thinks to herself, _then the polished, practiced manner of the Republic’s senators. Different, even more so, then the lords and ladies and dukes and duchesses and other masquerading royals all pretending to tolerate one another to win at the rules of their diplomatic chessboard_. Only a few days ago, Padmé told Anakin she thinks she’d been too young for the rule given to her by the trust of her people. Now, she thinks, he also had been buried under the weight of expectations too heavy for small shoulders to ever carry. 

“Was it a mistake for me to come out to wait here? Should I head back inside?” Padmé asks them, desiring their first hand experience of the planet in order to make a decision going forward. Absurdly, Padmé imagines the holonews headlines: _Senator Padmé Amidala, former Queen of Naboo, avoids assassins in Coruscant and Naboo dies from random spider attack on outer rim desert planet dressed in a scandalous nightie. Turn to page ten for more details._

“No, there are spiders everywhere here,” Beru tells her, as Owen rounds around the corner of the blanket with a thin, long lighter. It sputters once or twice, wheezing with age, before the burst of blue tinged red flame erupts, and Owen sets to one hairy leg, then a couple more. A putrid, acrid scent quickly saturates the air around them, making the sour pit of anxiety present in Padmé’s stomach rise dangerously up the back of her throat. 

“It’s the little ones you have to watch out for,” Owen says, gesturing towards the crisping insect. “These ones are scary looking, but relatively benign. Little one bites you, that’s it. No hope for a medical droid.” 

Padmé nods tightly. “I’ll endeavour to avoid those.” 

“Surprised Anakin didn’t warn you about them,” Owen says. He speaks in a low voice, Padmé notes, but almost practiced. As if he wants to say things differently. 

Padmé smiles, and sits closer to Beru, allowing space for Cliegg to hover, a silent watchman, over the blanket, as Owen sits guard near the edge where the spider emerged. “He’s had a lot on his mind, with his Jedi training and his new assignment. And I’ve been here before. He may have thought I’d already encountered one.” 

There is a long beat. Padmé watches as Cliegg turns his head round, to glance at her, eyebrows raised and lips pursued. Owen stiffens, his shoulders rounding, while Beru blinks rapidly, reminding Padmé of the snow owls of Alderaan she’d seen on a hiking excursion with her fellow junior legislative youth programme members before her tenure as queen. 

“What is it?” she asks, after Beru and Owen stare at each other. 

Owen’s hand comes up to rub the back of his neck, while Beru looks pointedly at the blanket, her fingers tracing along the fabric in a looped motion. “We thought-—well—” 

He trails off, reluctant to go forward. The wind gusts heavily, picking up sand, which lands in Padmé’s open thermajug, and as she looks to the horizon again, once again seeing nothing, not even a shadow, she wants to scream: _Where are you? Come back. Come back to me._

A bit frustrated, Padmé waves her hand. “Thought what?” 

Cliegg, whose silence feels a bit like a funeral shroud, clears his throat. A snotty part of Padmé, the one that still clings to the cobwebs in her mind, that come out at the most inopportune times, wonders what kind of preconceived notions the Lars’ family have about Anakin. After all, wasn’t it Anakin who left for ten years? Who was freed from slavery and Tatooine and never seemed to look back? In their eyes, he hasn’t written, hasn’t commed, never visited. It must have seemed like he abandoned his mother to these simple farming folks, ones who knew nothing about the Jedi way of life and the strictures of their code. Ones who know nothing about the strength of Anakin’s love. 

“We thought you might have been his owner,” he says, in an even toned voice that belies the implications of his words. Padmé grows tense, her spine straightens, and she almost rises up from the blanket, as offense and horror and dawning dismay begins to course through her, for a moment overtaking the present hum of her worry. “Shmi never heard back from the boy. Sometimes, out here, slaves get played and told they’ll be freed, only for the new owner to turn around and reveal it all as an elaborate game. No contact with the family. Lost hope.” 

Beru holds out her hand. It hovers over Padmé’s own trembling fingers, uncertain. “What else were we supposed to think?” Padmé looks at her, eyes so wide it hurts, refusing to blink. She thinks of the slaves picking up fruit at market stalls with bruises on their faces, thinks of Shmi and Anakin’s hollow cheeks and brittle bones, before she remembers her own naive shock _at the thriving trade of slaves on the Outer Rim_ and the assurance that _never, never would that happen in the Republic, it couldn’t_ —

“The Jedi forbid attachments,” she tells them, voice low and numb, as she stares blankly towards the horizon. “They don’t allow them to write or visit. Not during their padawan training. It is-—a very removed way of life.” 

All at once, the three Lars’—and Padmé recalls, faintly, that Beru is actually called Whitesun—stare piercingly at her. Padmé’s used to a number of different, frankly unsettling, glares and glances from diplomats and politicians, but she squirms inwardly, half from her own embarrassment at her own presumption and half from the looks themselves, not sure how to move forward. She is unmoored here; earlier, when she’d offered to sleep in her ship, so as not to put the Lars’ out being an unexpected and uninvited guest, Beru’s teeth clench and white knuckles around dishes being sonically cleaned, and Owen’s terse reply of “we’ve got the room, milady” had shocked her. It wasn’t, she had thought, because she was ungrateful, but rather, that she was unused to the simple kindness of strangers. 

Once, a nine-year-old boy had brought her home with him to avoid a sand storm. Once, she’d been prepared to march back to her ship through that sand storm. Once, she might have perished from her own ignorance. 

The wind crashes against one of the metal shutters serving as windows somewhere down below the farm. It startles her, and for a second she thinks, “ _Ani?_ ” but no. There is nothing out there but a dark, unfathomable expanse and a million bursts of starlight. 

After a moment or two, Cliegg gruffly, sullenly, and with a voice full of untold mourning, he says, “I hope those Jedi haven’t stolen time from Shmi and her son.” It’s a far cry from his attitude earlier, his unwavering insistence that Shmi was gone. Now, there was a fool’s hope, if only resting on one small chance to reunite mother and son. 

“They have,” Owen mutters darkly. 

Later, after their conversation lingers and springs in bursts to settle on Anakin and Naboo and the Jedi, then Shmi, the long night begins to take its toll. Some time before dawn, Beru begins to nod off, head listing to the side, almost colliding with Padmé’s shoulder. Owen asks, “Mind if I take her inside?” and Padmé suggests that they should all head in. The door stays open behind them, though the horizon is still glaringly blank of anything but endless sand, and Padmé yawns, eyes watering, as she lays down upon the sleeping pad. She doesn’t sleep, but she closes her eyes to cover her racing thoughts from the world, and before she knows it C-3PO knocks on the door to tell her breakfast is prepared. 

It is only after a thin porridge of heavily spiced legumes and a purple tuber stuffed into a pocketed flatbread that tastes, too, of legumes, Anakin appears. There’s dust on his face, and coating his hair is a crown of sand, which shakes and falls on top of its siblings on the ground as the young man moves as fast as he can without jostling the woman in his arms. Shmi looks terrible, bruises and cuts and a coat made of blood, as her skin is exposed and rough and red. She is thin, so impossibly thin, her skin stretched and cracked over her bones, and her hair is matted, parts having fallen out (maybe torn, Padame thinks darkly) out to reveal a bruised scalp. 

“Ani?” she says, at the same time that Cliegg emerges from the dining room with his hoverchair spurting sand, his own, desperate voice crying, “Shmi?” Anakin ignores them both, going towards a room, waving a hand to open the shutters, and then laying Shmi onto a sleeping pad. Padmé follows, her heart in her throat. She can hear the rattle of Shmi’s gasps, and she’s heard this type of breath before. It’s the death gasp—the one she’d heard from Cordé on the landing platform just three weeks ago, and countless others over the years. Someone rushes past her, and she vaguely recognizes it as Owen, who goes to help Anakin grab pillows to prop up Shmi’s head, despite Anakin’s protests. 

“I’m helping,” Owen says, with a glare that matches Anakin’s own. They stare at each other for a moment, and every line of Anakin’s body is stiff, poised and prepared to jump at a moment’s notice. 

His jaw clenches, his adam’s apple bobbing with his terse reply, “Just don’t get in the way.” 

Cliegg hovers next to Shmi, face as white as bone, and his hands are grasping one of her limp ones. She looks at him, blearily. “Oh,” she says, in a weak voice.“I’m home.” 

“Yes,” Cliegg says, voice breaking. Tears are running down his craggy cheeks, catching in the wrinkles and stress lines. “You are. We’re all here.” 

Anakin goes to sit next to her, his hand brushing sweaty, blood crusted strands of hair off her forehead. Padmé stands at the door, uncertain. Beru lingers next to Owen, whose right knee is propped on the ground, his hand outstretched, but not touching. “Mom,” they both say, and this time they do not glare. 

Shmi’s brown eyes are waxy, but there is a small, tight smile forming, though her face grimaces sharply as one of the scabs on her lips tears. “My boys,” she manages to rasp out. 

Then, she looks to Anakin. “So handsome.” Padmé watches his bottom lip tremble, and finally she moves, to grab his free hand. Shmi does not see her, or so it seems. There is no coming back from this, everyone in the room knows. Anakin had found her just in time to bring her back home before—

All of Shmi’s energy is focused on one last glimpse of her son. Anakin’s hand tightens, almost painfully, but Padmé grasps back. She feels like she is grounding him. Gasping, Shmi says, “I love you,” before one last, lingering raspy breath. 

“Mom?” Anakin asks, in a small, soft voice. “Mom?” 

For a moment, time stands still. Padmé feels her throat constrict, before Beru lets up a hiccuping sob, Owen curls, his head bowed. Cliegg just stares, long and forlorn, at the woman who’d once been his wife. 

Anakin—

_Breaks_. 

It’s not so much a dam, but a storm. His entire body goes taunt, and if not for Padmé holding on to him, she thinks he might leap from where he sits. He’s crying, but not sobs. They are silent, tracking tears, steady but stoic, as if just the act of grief is an act of shame. Padmé doesn’t think, just reaches forward and, meeting no resistance, lets his head turn and falls onto her shoulder, as her arms come to rest around his chest.

Distantly, Padmé vaguely registers in the midst of Anakin’s trembling, the wind and the sand seem to howl. Later, after the body is washed and wrapped, then burned, and buried, after they’ve left the Lars farm with no intention of return and C-3PO puttering about their ship, Padmé thinks that this might be the moment she accepts the kiss on the balcony of Varykino, there’s been no turning back. 

Neither, she thinks, as Anakin turns the ship towards Geonosis, can she bring herself to really give a damn. 


End file.
